Changedetection.io

Open source alternative to Visualping, Distill.io, Wachete, Hexowatch and ChangeTower

35.5K stars
Apache-2.0
Active this week
Last commit today

Last verified Nov 4, 2026

Monitor web pages for changes and get instant alerts via Discord, Slack, email, and 85+ notification services, with optional AI summaries.

Visit website GitHub35.5K Deploy on Hostinger

Read the full breakdownWho it is for, how it works, trade-offs, the quick start and the FAQ

who it's for

Who Changedetection.io is for#

Tracking price drops and restock alerts for products

Track product pages for price drops, back-in-stock events, and limited-time offers. Set upper and lower price thresholds or restock triggers and get alerted via Discord, Telegram, or email the moment the page changes. Price history is tracked over time as a graph so you can identify seasonal pricing patterns.

Skip if:

You want to track prices without self-hosting a server; the official managed subscription at $8.99/month covers this without infrastructure setup.

Monitoring government and regulatory pages for updates

Watch government websites, regulatory bodies, and legal document repositories for page updates that do not come with RSS feeds or email notifications. Useful for compliance teams tracking policy changes, data journalists following public records, or researchers monitoring institutional announcements.

Skip if:

The pages you need to monitor actively block automated HTTP fetchers; Playwright rendering adds resilience but cannot bypass every anti-bot measure.

Competitive intelligence and developer monitoring

Watch competitor pricing pages, job boards, changelog feeds, and release notes for updates. Use JSON API monitoring with JSONPath or jq filters to track specific API fields rather than full-page diffs. The browser steps feature handles pages that require a logged-in session before the content loads.

Skip if:

You need a managed monitoring service with uptime SLAs and no server administration.

Website defacement and HTML integrity monitoring

Set up change detection on your own public-facing pages to get immediate alerts if content is added, removed, or modified unexpectedly. Useful for PCI compliance monitoring of HTML source and for detecting unauthorized changes to critical pages before visitors encounter them.

Skip if:

You need a commercially supported tool with audit trails and compliance certifications for enterprise security programs.

the problem

The problem it solves#

Keeping track of changes on web pages you care about is a manual, error-prone process. For bargain hunters checking product prices, compliance teams watching regulatory pages, or developers monitoring competitor feature announcements, the volume of pages to track quickly outgrows manual checking.

Paid services address this but charge per URL and route all traffic through their own cloud infrastructure, which is a problem when the URLs are sensitive, proprietary, or simply numerous. Free tiers on Visualping, Distill, and similar tools cap out at a handful of watched pages, and pricing scales steeply from there. For anyone monitoring hundreds of URLs or needing data to stay in-house, the cost and privacy trade-offs make commercial tools impractical.

how Changedetection.io solves it

How it solves it#

85+ notification channels via apprise

Integrates with over 85 notification services, covering Discord, Slack, Telegram, Rocket Chat, email, Matrix, NTFY, Office 365, custom JSON webhooks, and more. Each watch in changedetection.io accepts its own notification URL, and Jinja2 templates let you customize notification titles and body content per watch.

AI-powered change summaries and smart alert filters

Connect any LLM provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Ollama, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint via LiteLLM) to get plain-English change summaries. Write a plain-English intent once and the AI evaluates every diff against it, suppressing irrelevant changes and reducing false-positive alerts. Works with GPT-4o-mini, Gemini Flash, local Ollama instances, and 100+ other providers.

Browser Steps for pages behind logins and interactions

Configure interactive browser steps before running change detection: fill form fields, click buttons, log in with username and password, accept cookie banners, or add items to a cart. This makes it possible to monitor pages that require authentication or multi-step navigation. Requires the Playwright fetcher to be enabled.

Visual Selector for targeted element monitoring

Instead of monitoring the entire page, use the Visual Selector to pick specific elements by clicking them in a visual overlay. Supports CSS selectors, XPath 1.0 and 2.0, JSONPath, and jq. This prevents spurious alerts from navigation menus, ads, or footer text that change constantly. Available when connected to a Playwright content fetcher.

Price and restock tracking for product pages

Enable the restock and price detection mode on any product page to extract pricing metadata from the HTML and track it over time as a graph. Set upper and lower price thresholds, percentage change triggers, or restock event alerts. Sends a notification when the price hits your target or when an out-of-stock item becomes available again.

JSON API monitoring with JSONPath and jq

Monitor JSON APIs directly with JSONPath or jq filters to extract, restructure, and compare specific fields. Changedetection.io can also parse JSON embedded in HTML pages (such as embedded ld+json structured data blocks), making it possible to track prices and availability on e-commerce sites that render from embedded JSON data. jq supports logic filters for conditional monitoring.

strengths · trade-offs

Strengths and trade-offs#

Strengths

Apache-2.0 license with no per-URL feesSelf-hosters run as many URL watches as their server can handle at no additional cost. Paid tools like Visualping charge per URL and scale fees with volume; changedetection.io has no such ceiling. The Apache-2.0 license permits commercial use, modification, and distribution without restriction.
35,508 GitHub stars with active maintenanceWith 35,508 stars and a last push in November 2026, changedetection.io is one of the most starred self-hosted monitoring tools in this category. Active maintenance means security patches, new notification integrations, and browser-compatibility fixes arrive regularly.
MCP support for AI agent integrationExposes an MCP (Model Context Protocol) endpoint so Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI agents can query your watched page data directly. This turns your change detection history into a resource for building automated workflows and asking natural-language questions about what changed and when.
Per-watch proxy configurationEach watch can be assigned its own proxy configuration, including Bright Data and Oxylabs integrations. Useful for monitoring geo-restricted content, rotating IPs to avoid blocks, or accessing pages through the Tor network. This is a capability most paid tools in this space do not expose at the per-URL level.

Trade-offs

-JavaScript rendering requires Playwright alongside DockerPlain HTTP fetching is lightweight, but monitoring JavaScript-rendered pages requires running headless Chromium via Playwright or Selenium WebDriver alongside the main container. This adds memory overhead; the project documentation recommends the sockpuppetbrowser image in the Docker Compose configuration. A minimal VPS with limited RAM will struggle with concurrent JavaScript-rendering sessions.
-323 open issues in the repositoryThe repository carries 323 open issues. For typical use cases this is a normal backlog for a popular open source project, but users who rely on edge cases like specific proxy configurations or unusual site structures may encounter bugs that have not yet been addressed.
-No built-in multi-user access controlChangedetection.io is designed as a single-user self-hosted tool. There is no built-in role-based access control or multi-user authentication. Teams running a shared instance need to handle access via a reverse proxy or VPN; the tool does not distinguish between users or restrict which watches they can see.

versus alternatives

Changedetection.io vs alternatives#

Changedetection.io vs Visualping

Visualping is one of the most widely used paid web monitoring tools and handles basic change detection without self-hosting. Its free tier watches up to 5 URLs with limited check frequency; paid plans start around $10/month and scale with the number of watches. As an alternative to Visualping, changedetection.io has no per-URL fee for self-hosters: the only cost is the server it runs on. For teams monitoring hundreds of URLs or sensitive pages they prefer not to route through a third-party cloud, the cost and data-ownership difference is material.

Visualping offers a consumer-friendly UI and a managed Chrome browser for JavaScript-rendered pages without configuration. Changedetection.io requires enabling Playwright alongside the Docker container for equivalent JS rendering, which adds setup effort. For non-technical users, Visualping's hosted product is simpler to get started with.

Changedetection.io vs Distill.io

Distill.io operates primarily as a browser extension with a cloud sync option, making it accessible without server setup. It handles JavaScript-rendered pages natively because it runs in the browser itself. The free plan allows limited monitors with infrequent checks; cloud monitoring with faster check intervals requires a paid subscription.

Changedetection.io runs server-side, which makes it better for high-frequency monitoring, automation workflows, and monitoring pages you do not visit in a browser. It supports 85+ notification channels via the apprise library compared to Distill.io's narrower notification options. For developers or teams running automated pipelines, changedetection.io's JSON API monitoring, webhook notifications, and LLM integration offer capabilities Distill.io does not cover.

Changedetection.io vs Hexowatch

Hexowatch markets itself as an AI-powered website monitoring service with multiple checking modes including visual, HTML, keyword, technology, availability, and API monitoring. It is a fully managed proprietary service with no self-hosting option. Plans start around $24/month.

Changedetection.io's LLM integration covers some of the same ground as Hexowatch's AI features: plain-English change rules, AI-generated summaries, and smart alert filtering. For self-hosters who bring their own LLM API key, this is available at the cost of the LLM calls rather than a Hexowatch subscription. Hexowatch's managed visual difference checking and automatic screenshot archive are well-implemented features with no setup burden; that trade-off favors Hexowatch for teams that want monitoring without infrastructure management.

install · quick start

Quick start#

bash

Deploy changedetection.io with Docker using a persistent data volume.
```bash
docker run -d --restart always -p "127.0.0.1:5000:5000" -v datastore-volume:/datastore --name changedetection.io docker.io/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io
```

tech stack · detected from GitHub

What it's built on#

Languages: JavaScriptPython
Frameworks: Flask

frequently asked

FAQ#

Does changedetection.io work on JavaScript-rendered pages?

Yes, but it requires a Playwright or Selenium WebDriver fetcher running alongside the main container. The Docker Compose file in the repository includes configuration for the sockpuppetbrowser image, which provides a headless Chromium instance. Plain HTTP fetching (the default) works for static pages and many server-rendered sites but cannot execute JavaScript.

What notification services are supported?

Changedetection.io supports over 85 notification services, including Discord, Slack, Telegram, Rocket Chat, email, Matrix, NTFY, Microsoft Teams, Office 365, custom JSON webhooks, and syslog. Each watch accepts one or more notification URLs, and Jinja2 templates let you customize the notification title and body per watch.

Can I use an AI or LLM for smarter change detection?

Yes. Bring your own API key for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint such as Ollama, LM Studio, or vLLM. Once configured, write plain-English rules (for example, 'only alert me when the price drops below $50') and get change summaries in plain language rather than raw HTML diffs. The LLM integration is powered by LiteLLM, which supports 100+ providers.

How does it monitor pages that require a login?

Browser Steps let you configure interactive actions before change detection runs: fill form fields, click buttons, log in with username and password, or accept cookie banners. Browser Steps require Playwright to be enabled and are configured in the watch's edit tab. After the steps complete, the Visual Selector tab lets you pick which elements to monitor.

Is there a managed hosted version available?

Yes. The same project offers a paid cloud subscription at $8.99/month that includes up to 5,000 URL watches, a real Chrome browser for JavaScript-rendering, proxy access including European, US, and Tor locations, and automatic updates with no server administration. The self-hosted version and the hosted version run the same open source codebase.

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